Friday, September 25, 2015

Fiorina doubles down on her dishonesty

by digby

Her Super-Pac decided to make an ad featuring the dishonest stock footage Fiorina claimed was in the Planned Parenthood videos. The ad is just as false as the claims she made in her weird staccato accusations in the debate.

In response to a request for comment on the veracity of the video, Fiorina’s campaign didn’t take a strictly legal approach and say they have no relationship with the Super PAC and therefore cannot comment on the ad. Her campaign spokeswomen Sarah Isgur Flores replied to an inquiry from Mother Jones via email:

“Carly is a cancer survivor and doesn’t need to be lectured on women’s health by anyone. Over their long and factually incorrect letter, Planned Parenthood doesn’t and can’t deny they butchering babies and selling their organs [sic]. This is about the character of our nation.”

Actually, Planned Parenthood does and can deny “they butchering babies and selling their organs.” It is simply not true.

Other campaigns have climbed down from similar claims about the videos. Fiorina and her allies have done no such thing. Three days after the debate, CARLY for America — the PAC that legally has to keep its distance from Fiorina’s actual campaign — put together a video that spliced the candidate’s answer with different clips. The viewer, hearing about the controversy but unaware of the original videos, might think that Fiorina nailed it.

That would be the idea. And it’s working. Think Progress interviewed some of her fans in South Carolina this week and they absolutely believe that Planned Parenthood is videotaping the butchering of babies to harvest their brains because this wonderful woman told them so.

Cleveland, Ohio resident Carol McDowell, who came to Fiorina’s event while on vacation in Charleston, said Fiorina’s debate performance really “won us over” — pointing to two of her friends. “I loved the Planned Parenthood response that she had. The things being done today — it’s gone way beyond just abortion and it needs to stop.”…

The message resonated with women in South Carolina. “Look, I got my first set of birth control pills from Planned Parenthood a long time ago,” said Lazar, who added that she is actually pro-choice. “I have nothing against them, but they should not be selling baby parts. As a country, we shouldn’t be doing that.”

It’s hard to believe anyone running for president believes she could get away with such blatant deceptions but never say Fiorina doesn’t have scads of chutzpah. She has refused to admit that she made a mistake and her Super PAC is now trying to cover her original lie with yet another lie. And even pro-choice GOP women are believing her. It’s enough to give you a migraine.

“On her card, it’s talking about how she’s trying to refute the war on women,” Charleston resident Mary Smith told ThinkProgress, pointing to the brochure Fiorina’s campaign gave to attendees. “She’s definitely trying to help us ladies out.”

Charleston resident Phyllis Lazar agreed, saying that “it would be amazing to have her up against Hillary Clinton because then they couldn’t sit there and use that ‘war on women’ stuff.” The New York Times wrote last month that many Republicans are looking at Fiorina as “the party’s weapon to counter the perception that it is waging a ‘war on women.’”

How exactly she will do that — aside from just being a woman — was less clear to Smith and other women in the audience. When asked to define the “war on women,” Smith said the Democratic Party likes to attack the GOP for trying to take away women’s reproductive rights and access to birth control. “I don’t really see any of that happening,” she said.

You can see how confused these women are. They are Republicans but they also believe in reproductive rights. The only way they can reconcile these two things is to believe the lying Carly Fiorina instead of their own lying eyes. And it’s easy to understand why they might do that. It’s almost impossible to believe anyone could tell such a dramatic tale with such conviction if it weren’t the truth. But that seems to be her special talent.